freedomPusher

joined 4 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

#LemmyWorld is in Cloudflare’s access-restricted walled garden. It’s an asshole instance that not only excludes some people from access but it hoards people who are in the included group, creating a perversely centralized power imbalance that rewards elitists. To non-assholes, Lemmy World communities are parasitic because they rob the fedi of the decentralized balance it needs. To participate in Lemmy World communities is to either be uninformed/out of touch OR to be an informed asshole.

That said, lemmy.ml is not a great place either. At least it’s not excluding people on the basis of IP address, but it’s still disproportionately large and has a history of political baggage by admins who are very trigger-happy with the censor button. You could have chosen a better instance, like Sopuli, but then your sidebar acknowledges the apparent past existence of a Sopuli AITA community.

NTA for giving refuge from a destructive instance. If it were reversed, and you were to create a community on Lemmy World that already exists in the free world, it would be a YTA case. Poaching users from a bad instance is a good semaritan move.

How to fix this


Promote the most digital rights respecting venue in the sidebar, which is !amitheasshole@discuss.tchncs.de. Encourage cross-posts to and from discuss.tchncs.de. Make no mention of Lemmy World and other centralized nodes.

I would not normally post in lemmy.ml but thought this thread was worthy of an exception.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

After reading the article it’s not as great as I was hoping for. From the article:

“We’re obviously going to be interested in having the books sell as successfully as possible, but we’re not going to harm the fundamental mission of the library to provide free and easy access to the content on our shelves. We’re not going to sacrifice that mission. Just because we’re operating Angel City Press, we’re not going to buy 500 copies of every title and put them in every branch library. That’s not prudent. That’s not what a good library would do.”

So it’s still a profit-driven press. This is a conflict of interest but the library seems confident they can negoiate that fairly.

I was hoping the press would become non-profit and then be used to print and distribute creative commons licensed content. I have a friend (who shall remain unnamed but who is well known) who would like to release their work into the commons and give up all rights apart from attribution. In principle a library-owned press would seem ideal. But I guess this is not the right tool for the job. It also seems the books this press will print are LA-specific anyway.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Kind of. Federated nodes would have an incidental mirror of some of the comments. Bits and pieces might be scattered but some or most of it would be totally lost. I can still see the sopuli mirror of one of the communities here: https://sopuli.xyz/c/law@links.esq.social and there is no indication that links.esq.social disappeared. In fact I can still post there as federated nodes give the illusion that it exists.

This is the problem with the Lemmyverse. There is no mechanism to use a pool of nodes to recreate the content. And without an vital sign, people can be posting into a void black hole.

Some chatter about ghost nodes here → https://sopuli.xyz/post/10404719

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I’ve not kept notes on it but there are a few stations doing it. I think it’s often the same few stations.

(edit) fwiw, I just heard BX1 do it (222.064 MHz in Brussels)

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

When you explain it that way, it reveals ambiguity in what “skipping” means. You mean packets get skipped. I get that too, which results in silence, thus choppiness. But that’s not what I was referring to.

When I say “skips like a CD/record”, it’s a different kind of skipping. With a record, it means the stylus/needle would jump grooves and repeat what was on the previous groove. On a CD, it’s when the laser would jump to the wrong groove, and repeat in a loop for a bit. That’s the skipping I’m talking about coming from DAB stations in Brussels, which I doubt could be signal quality related on a one-way signal. That is, if a DAB receiver were to play a stream of questionable packets then ask the transmitter to resend it, then try again, that would result in CD-like skipping, but surely DAB would not have the two-way comms that that kind of error correction would call for.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I’m quite familiar with relays in the SMTP context which is not a context where an end user installs relays. An end user in that case would only direct their own software to use a relay that has been installed by a service provider in control of a server. So when you say install a Lemmy relay, I’m missing the concept. What exactly is a Lemmy relay? Can you walk me through this scenario: suppose someone is on Beehaw and they cannot reach node X because Beehaw defederated from node X. What are the steps for a Beehaw user to subscribe to a community that is hosted on node X?

(btw, browse.feddit.de is just a blank page for me)

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Every node has a different set of relationships to other nodes. If you create only one account and you choose a small low-activity node, you’re isolated by which nodes are federated and defederated to that node. The front page timeline is also limited by the subscriptions of others on that node which narrows what’s exposed to you. And worse, because most of the population has disregard for decentralization, those subscriptions are mostly to communities on the biggest nodes which exacerbates the imbalance.

It’s good for the decentralization principle to avoid the large nodes¹, but doing that bring isolation and limited exposure. So to counter those problems you need accounts on multiple small nodes.

¹ This means not only avoiding having an account on the large nodes but also avoiding communities hosted on those giant nodes.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t think those figures are trustworthy. I recall a page that tracks user counts which named some server I never heard of with a count an order of magnitude higher than lemmy.world. Might have been lemmyverse.net, not sure.

Counting active accounts is a bit tricky I can imagine. So I judge by looking at the activity. Lemmy has ghost towns and 1 person communities which appear from the timeline like an announcement community but in fact they are open discussions where hardly anyone participates except the moderator. These are not niche topics either. It’s because users only want to manage one account. The stock web client dominates, which is inherently a one-account client. So the single most popular app fails to resist the gravity of the giant nodes. There is a paltry selection of 3rd party apps. Nothing in the Debian official repos.

I went to phtn.app and just got a 500 error. So whatever that is, it’s probably not a significant factor here either way.

In Mastodon threads I see more diversity of nodes people are coming from. Whereas when reading a quite active Lemmy thread you see something like 90% of comments coming from the top 5.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I might have to try that app.

As a Debian user I tend to work close to the ideology of using apps from official Debian repos. Debian is quite popular but also disciplined with a quality standard. So an app’s inclusion in the Debian repo somewhat reflects a level of maturity that puts a project on the radar to be taken seriously. There are currently no threadiverse apps in the Debian repos.

Some would say generally that no non-Debian app is worth looking at. But I do make some exceptions and might have to take a look at Eternity despite the opening sentence: “Eternity is currently in the early stages of development. Expect many unfinished features and bugs!”

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mobile apps for this sort of thing is quite alien to me -- out of sight and out of mind because I cannot imagine using a small screen and tiny keyboard for forums when I am all day sitting at a PC with proper keyboard. Although speech to text probably makes small device input a little more tolerable.

The small nodes are not dead, so I wonder if the activity and accounts on the disproportionately small nodes can be attributed largely to mobile app users.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I cannot see the image because it’s posted in the walled garden of #Cloudflare, which excludes me. Would someone please repost the image on an open-access instance or website so everyone can view it?

 

The linked doc is a PDF which looks very different in Adobe Acrobat than it does in evince and okular, which I believe are both based on the same GhostScript library.

So the question is, is there an alternative free PDF viewer that does not rely on the GhostScript library for rendering?

#AskFedi

 

I simply wanted to submit a bug report. This is so fucked up. The process so far:

① solved a CAPTCHA just to reach a reg. form (I have image loading disabled but the graphical CAPTCHA puzzle displayed anyway (wtf Firefox?)
② disposable email address rejected (so Bitbucket can protect themselves from spam but other people cannot? #hypocrisy)
③ tried a forwarding acct instead of disposable (accepted)
③ another CAPTCHA, this time Google reCAPTCHA. I never solve these because it violates so many digital right principles and I boycott Google. But made an exception for this experiment. The puzzle was empty because I disable images (can’t afford the bandwidth). Exceptionally, I enable images and solve the piece of shit. Could not work out if a furry cylindrical blob sitting on a sofa was a “hat”, but managed to solve enough puzzles.
④ got the green checkmark ✓
⑤ clicked “sign up”
⑥ “We are having trouble verifying reCAPTCHA for this request. Please try again. If the problem persists, try another browser/device or reach out to Atlassian Support.”

Are you fucking kidding me?! Google probably profited from my CAPTCHA work before showing me the door. Should be illegal. Really folks, a backlash of some kind is needed. I have my vision and couldn’t get registered (from Tor). Imagine a blind Tor user.. or even a blind clearnet user going through this shit. I don’t think the first CAPTCHA to reach the form even had an audio option.

Shame on #Bitbucket!

⑦ attempted to e-mail the code author:

status=bounced (host $authors_own_mx_svr said: 550-host $my_ip is listed at combined.mail.abusix.zone (127.0.0.11); 550 see https://lookup.abusix.com/search?q=%24my_ip (in reply to RCPT TO command))

#A11y #enshitification

 

If you’re logged out and reading a thread, you should be able to login in another tab and then do a forced refresh (control-shift-R); and it should show the thread with logged-in control. For some reason the cookie isn’t being passed or (perhaps more likely) the cookie is insufficient because Lemmy is using some mechanism other than cookies.

Scenario 2:

You’re logged in and reading threads in multiple tabs. Then one tab becomes spontaneously logged out after you take some action. Sometimes a hard-refresh (control-shift-R) recovers, sometimes not. It’s unpredictable. But note that the logged-in state is preserved in other tabs. So if several hard refreshes fail, I have to close the tab and use another tab to navigate to where I was in the other tab. And it seems navigation is important.. if I just copy the URL for where I was (same as opening a new tab), it’s more likely to fail.

In any case, there are no absolutes.. the behavior is chaotic and could be related to this security bug.

 

Some people think Cloudflare is not a “walled garden”. This article goes to a great extent to show not only that Cloudflare is a #walledGarden, but it’s actually more of a walled garden than the well known ones (Facebook & Google).

 

People on a tight budget are limited to capped internet connections. So we disable images in our browser settings. Some environmentalists do the same to avoid energy waste. If we need to download a web-served file (image, PDF, or anything potentially large), we run this command:

$ curl -LI "$URL"

The HTTP headers should contain a content-length field. This enables us to know before we fetch something whether we can afford it. (Like seeing a price tag before buying something)

#Cloudflare has taken over at least ~20% of the web. It fucks us over in terms of digital rights in so many ways. And apparently it also makes the web less usable to poor people in two ways:

  • Cloudflare withholds content length information
  • Cloudflare blocks people behind CGNAT, which is commonly used in impoverished communities do to limited number of IPv4 addresses.
 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/10440580

The source of this article is in a walled garden that disrespects our privacy so I will not cite it. But here’s the text, posted here in the free world for all people to access:


The menace of “the War on Cash” is making steady headway across the board.

And that’s whether it concerns big-time international policy-makers pushing for total digitization of financial assets – or individual examples that showcase just how serious this threat is.

Here’s one such case: Elizabeth Dasburg and two others were denied the right to use cash to pay entry fee to the Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia, managed by the National Park Service.

It’s turned into, “parks, but no recreation” – because the victims of this violation of US law regulating the use of domestic currency have now opted for litigation.

Plain and simple, Dasburg and the two others believe it is still illegal in the US to refuse to accept the country’s legal tender. Or is it? That’s the question the US District Court for the District of Columbia will have to spell out.

Judging by the filing, the Fort Pulaski employees were equally indoctrinated against accepting cash, as they were trying to be helpful. The visitors were first told in no uncertain terms that only cards are accepted.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

And then, if – say they had no cards (that they might not want to use them doesn’t seem to have been a consideration) – they were instructed to go to a grocery chain like Walmart and buy a gift card.

However bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated this might sound – all the more ironic, because it appears the “explanation” for this policy is that cards are more “convenient” – that’s what Fort Pulaski wanted.

Cards. Of any sort. Things that can be tracked and tied to a person, in other words.

“By forcing people to use credit cards or digital wallets, under the guise of convenience, the National Park Service becomes a player in the surveillance state, undermining park visitors’ privacy right,” Children’s Health Defense (CHD) General Counsel Mack Rosenberg commented on the case – and the state of affairs.

CDH has decided to put its money where its mouth is and support the defendants’ case financially.

The National Park Service is said to have been working on cashless-only payment options for some years, the scheme now in effect in to close to 30 national parks, historic sites and monuments.

While those behind such things are always happy to present themselves as champions of “equality and diversity,” the reality looks quite different.

“Only half of low-income households have access to a credit card, according to a March 2022 Federal Reserve Bank of New York report,” CHD President Laura Bono said in a letter to the Park and Service CEO.

 

Keeping $1k in a bank for 1 year is equal to the CO₂ emissions of flying New York to Seattle. Because banks invest in fossil fuels.

 

The source of this article is in a walled garden that disrespects our privacy so I will not cite it. But here’s the text, posted here in the free world for all people to access:


The menace of “the War on Cash” is making steady headway across the board.

And that’s whether it concerns big-time international policy-makers pushing for total digitization of financial assets – or individual examples that showcase just how serious this threat is.

Here’s one such case: Elizabeth Dasburg and two others were denied the right to use cash to pay entry fee to the Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia, managed by the National Park Service.

It’s turned into, “parks, but no recreation” – because the victims of this violation of US law regulating the use of domestic currency have now opted for litigation.

Plain and simple, Dasburg and the two others believe it is still illegal in the US to refuse to accept the country’s legal tender. Or is it? That’s the question the US District Court for the District of Columbia will have to spell out.

Judging by the filing, the Fort Pulaski employees were equally indoctrinated against accepting cash, as they were trying to be helpful. The visitors were first told in no uncertain terms that only cards are accepted.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

And then, if – say they had no cards (that they might not want to use them doesn’t seem to have been a consideration) – they were instructed to go to a grocery chain like Walmart and buy a gift card.

However bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated this might sound – all the more ironic, because it appears the “explanation” for this policy is that cards are more “convenient” – that’s what Fort Pulaski wanted.

Cards. Of any sort. Things that can be tracked and tied to a person, in other words.

“By forcing people to use credit cards or digital wallets, under the guise of convenience, the National Park Service becomes a player in the surveillance state, undermining park visitors’ privacy right,” Children’s Health Defense (CHD) General Counsel Mack Rosenberg commented on the case – and the state of affairs.

CDH has decided to put its money where its mouth is and support the defendants’ case financially.

The National Park Service is said to have been working on cashless-only payment options for some years, the scheme now in effect in to close to 30 national parks, historic sites and monuments.

While those behind such things are always happy to present themselves as champions of “equality and diversity,” the reality looks quite different.

“Only half of low-income households have access to a credit card, according to a March 2022 Federal Reserve Bank of New York report,” CHD President Laura Bono said in a letter to the Park and Service CEO.

 

The problem:

  1. !cashless_society@nano.garden is created
  2. node A users subscribe and post
  3. node B users subscribe and post
  4. nano.garden disappears forever
  5. users on node A and B have no idea; they carry on posting to their local mirror of cashless_society.
  6. node C never federated with nano.garden before it was unplugged

So there are actually 3 bugs AFAICT:

  1. Transparency: users on nodes A and B get no indication that they are interacting with a ghost community.
  2. Broken comms: posts to the ghost community from node A are never sync’d, thus never seen by node B users; and vice-versa.
  3. Users on node C have no way to join the conversation because the search function only finds non-ghost communities.

The fix for ① is probably as simple as adding a field to the sidebar showing the timestamp of the last sync operation.

w.r.t. ②, presumably, A and B do not connect directly because they are each federated to the ghost node. So there is no way for node A posts to reach node B. Correct? Lemmy should be designed to accommodate a node disappearing at any time with no disruption to other nodes. Node A and B should directly sychronize.

w.r.t. ③ node C should still be able to join the conversation between A and B w.r.t the ghost community.

(original thread)

 

This is a seriously big loophole. Paraphrasing the various positions:

Data Controller:

“data collection is legal because we have a contract with the data subject” (iow, they claim Art.6.1(b) as the legal basis for processing)

Data Subject:

“There is no contract. I did not agree to a contract.”

Supervisory Authority:

“we do not act on contract issues”

EDPB:

“the scope of the GDPR does not include harmonization of national provisions of contract law”

I’m not finding it ATM, but somewhere in the GDPR or EDPB guidelines it says something to the effect of contract law varying across all member states, and therefore the GDPR is not applicable to contract matters and the validity of contracts cannot be assessed.

So, WTF? It’s a blatant abuse flying in the face of the GDPR when a data controller simply falsely claims a contract is in play. Since the SAs opt-out of regulating contract cases, this leaves data subjects with only direct court action.

 

I can post to !cashless_society@nano.garden, no problem. But then when visiting nano.garden there is no Lemmy server there.

What I think is going on: nano.garden was once a Lemmy server that federated to Sopuli, Sopuli users subscribed, and then nano.garden ghosted us.. disappeared. Yet posts can still be composed and old posts are still viewable locally. Participants carry on with the illusion that nano.garden exists.

Amiright? What are the consequences? Does this mean Sopuli users can only see new posts that come from other Sopuli users going forward?

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